Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs. Not saying it can be implemented right away, but it should be a policy goal for cities.
You have all the right in the world to prefer driving and chilling on your air conditioning and stereo if you can afford it, but it shouldn't be free if you're occupying the lane space 10 people would occupy in a bus, and making the traffic slower for the bus in doing so.
Completely agree with you. I live in Montpellier, France, and we have had free public transportation for a year and a half, and it's very good. I definitely use my car less and take public transport more often.
Everyone, including people without cars, pays for the roads through taxes; it is only fair to do the same for public transport.
Society pays for cars in a lot of ways other than just taxes. Roads/highways/parking takes up tons of valuable land (opportunity costs). Cars cause a lot of medical conditions, from respiratory/cardiovascular diseases, to obesity. Cars add to climate change, which causes extreme weather events. Congestion and noise impacts health and the economy, etc. Cities all around the world would be net improved with much fewer cars.
I don't want to comment on if it should be free or not, but public transit and micromobility should always be cheaper than owning+driving a car. Even with NYC's controversial new congestion pricing, it's still cheaper to drive your family to the city than to take them via train.
No it's absolutely not cheaper to drive your family into the city. You said owning+driving a car; did you really take into account ownership costs (maintenance, insurance etc) and driving costs (tolls, parking)? Just the cost of parking alone dwarfs the cost of the train.
Sure but most families need a car anyway, and once you have one the costs of ownership, maintenance, insurance etc. are irrelevant to the costs of individual trips.
You want to buy a second-hand car. What's the first thing you check? Yep, the mileage. The cost of a car is basically down to its depreciation, which is basically down to its mileage.
Most families in NYC do not need to own a car, and in fact most don't.
But even then we have to consider marginal costs. Owning one car is better than two or three. Here in Texas, it's not uncommon to see households with 4 or 5 cars.
Commuting as one person from Mountain View to SF was cheaper with a car including the total ownership cost of the car, nevermind the reasonable discount for "stuff I wand to do with my car other than commute".
And riding caltrain during peak hours for an hour twice a day would violate the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.
Riding Caltrain during peak hours is totally fine and not unpleasant at all, particularly with the new trains (I do it most days and am writing this comment while doing so)
I left California before the new trains were a thing, but peak hours going north starting in Mountain View meant standing room only tightly packed on the world's more unstable train cars.
I took Caltrain regularly pre-pandemic when I had a job in Palo Alto and going to SF. It was not bad at all. Other cities like NYC had way more packed trains.
> Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs
Strongly disagree. There are too many perverse incentives that work against transit. If there are a lot of car commuters (which there will be - plumbers taking their tools to the job for example) they have inventive to pressure politicians to reduce that tax - any voting block will always be more powerful than the distributed masses. Your transit operators need to ensure transit doesn't become too popular: the more people taking transit the less cars there are paying that tax.
Besides almost no transit rider is worried about costs. They are all interested instead in better service, so use all the money you can get - including fares - to build better service. This is long term what everyone needs.
Yes you do need a program for the poor. However the majority of your people shouldn't be in that program.
I'm going to guess that you're a fellow American. That's our answer to everything - build a ghetto. Why make anything nice for everybody when you can make it suck for 79% of us, Hell on Earth for another 20+%, and nice for the privileged few?
Most ghettos aren't built to be ghettos. They were built as nice neighborhoods and have nothing structurally wrong with them, but then had criminals and shitbags wreck the place. Ghettoification can in fact be reversed without any changes to infrastructure by simply having nice people move in who give a shit and make an effort to clean up and maintain their properties. This is derogatorily called "gentrification".
Also, your ratios are absurdly out of wack. 79% of the country doesn't live in a ghetto and you don't need to be economically or socially privileged to maintain a nice neighborhood. Most working class neighborhoods are not ghettos, nor even resemble one in the slightest.
The ghetto is that bottom 20% living in Hell, not the 79% who merely deal with things that suck.
Although I was more referring to our systems more broadly (health care, education, transportation - the topic of this post), let's go with neighborhoods. Are you really trying to pretend that red-lining didn't happen? Or that de facto sundown towns didn't exist at least into the 1980s?
While things are bad for some people, calling the bottom 20% living in Hell is an exaggeration that is nowhere near correct. People always complain about their situation and think it is somehow much worse than other people, so if you see someone who is in worse shape you can think it is a living hell. However the reality is very different, and if you step back and look you discover most people in that bottom 20% are happy overall despite having imperfections.
I mean in the US a bunch of them are still the remaining product of redlining policies where racial minorities were allowed to live but banks would not give loans. Housing segregation was planned and enforced. That sounds a lot like intentional creation of a ghetto. And later when cities need to invest in building amenities, or raze neighborhoods to make way for infrastructure, often it's been the minority neighborhoods that are neglected or destroyed respectively. Of _course_ ghettos are the result of planning and intentional policy.
To be very clear, redlining didn't happen just because a bunch of individual bankers happened to be racist. It was a consequence of federal policy -- the FHA would insure loans in white neighborhoods but not in minority neighborhoods, so even for a rational banker uninterested in race, it made sense to issue the loans for white home buyers, and not minority home buyers, even if they were financially qualified. The "redline" choices were not where a bunch of separate banks had independently decided that some "bad risk" threshold was crossed -- they were picked by HOLC/FHA. The FHA also subsidized construction of white housing developments, but not minority ones.
When people refer to "systemic racism", the "systemic" part is typically literal.
Also, I invite you to take a step back and interrogate the examine the implicit premises of your question. I think you're saying that _in a free market of rational agents_, it doesn't make economic sense to not issue loans to people who _aren't_ credit risks, and I would agree -- except housing segregation was always about a heavily artificially manipulated (not free) market, in which people of color couldn't purchase a home in a white neighborhood regardless of their willingness to pay. Public policy bent over backwards to coerce all parties to maintain segregation (e.g. sundown towns, racial covenants, etc), ironically including during cold-war years when the US simultaneously tried to be a global advocate for free markets.
Do you mean today or in 1950? In 1950 I'll go with racists for the majority of banks. Today race is not a factor, but credit risks are still important.
If your public transport is so popular that it's becoming infeasible to fund it from car taxes... mission fucking accomplished! That is such a wild and nonsensical fear. "But what if it's too successful?!"
Eh no, that is an actual failure mode. Germany is experiencing it right now. What it means is everyone ends up being forced to use horribly broken public transport and it screws up everyone's business and personal lives.
It is possible for public transport to be too popular. It looks like overloaded, crowded and constantly broken lines that can't get better because they're starved of funding.
Public transport being massively/too popular is the only way for it to get anywhere near the level of funding it needs. That's not really a failure mode, just a symptom of the real failure. It was extremely easy for governments to ignore it and leave it to rot for decades because it had next to no lobby compared to cars.
The 9€ and Deutschlandticket reinvigorated that lobby - although that's being snuffed out again.
Looking at the Swedish railway, the issue is related to budget but the problem is not that simple. The main issue is that the railway system lacks redundancy in track capacity, meaning that any failure require short term fixes in order to reduce short term losses. Those short term fixes eventually leads to overall higher downtime and higher failure rates, which only lead to a even more focus on quick fixes and shoddy repairs. Building out new capacity becomes too expensive and takes too long time, and takes money from the budget that is needed to do all the quick fixes that pop up. When those lines become too popular, the pressure only increases to continue do quick fixes, since any downtime has even larger impact both on the straining cargo traffic and passenger throughput.
It becomes like the meme when people talk about nuclear power. Sure, it would had been an good idea 10-20 years ago, but there is no time to do it now and it cost too much. Next year will be even later, and it will cost even more. Any new funding need to be channeled directly to the starving short-term budget, which will continue to always be too low on funding.
One differente with nuclear power is that today we have a better option - renewables - and so nuclear doesn't make sense at all any price. By contrast we don't have anything completely better than mass transit for some cases and to it makes sense to build it and make it cheaper.
This is backwards. The public transit lobby is the Green/climate lobby which is absolutely massive and incredibly influential because it peddles to politicians a unifying moral story about the end of the world that justifies unlimited exercise of political power.
What does the auto industry have in response? Jobs? The left don't care about jobs to begin with, they view anything linked to capitalism or employers to be inherently suspicious.
To see this is true, just look at which group is a net tax payer vs net tax recipient. Car drivers subsidize public transport everywhere I know of (unless you get into stupid arguments that assume world peace exists solely for the purpose of oil transport).
Much of the green mokement is a hypocrite that wants to appear green- but don't take their cars or gas away. And so polititians exploit that to build minimal transit - enough to look like they did something but not enough to take away cars.
Budget for German train system has been cut and was too low for two decades. It was well known that would result in what we have today.
You have to invest in infrastructure to keep it at a high quality level. It's crowded because it has been lacking proper funding for years. It's a result of politics, nothing stops public transport from being popular and providing reasonable high quality service.
Inability to competently manage finances within the framework of populist democratic politics is one of the top reasons governments suck at running things and "public *" often ends in failure.
I don't know much about what Germany is experiencing, but even Germany's neighbors in the Netherlands and France seem to be having a renaissance predicated upon getting people out of their personal automobiles. Perhaps the problem is actually the outsized influence of the auto industry in Germany?
No, auto industry is dying in Germany and was more powerful in the past. German railway collapse is a recent phenomenon. It's the inverse: the Green push to make everyone use public transport is collapsing both the auto industry and public transit there.
Wow, that first paragraph is a compelling political economy argument against this policy that I hadn't really thought of. Your model seems to take the assumptions that the trade industries can't reorganize to optimize car usage, and that transit operators have only one stream of income (the car tax).
Both are untrue, IMO, and in the desired steady state the car tax is in fact near zero, substituted by higher taxes on everything else. Even if that ends up making the city more expensive, the variation in utility is still at least positive if we model citizens' utility functions as negatively sloped on the pollution axis, and of course if we are assuming the central planning wants to comply with global warming goals.
I would even question if tradespeople would be against paying the car tax if it gets commuters out of the road, to be honest. I'd wager a plumber would be more than willing to pay even 100$ monthly if you worded it as "you get a fast pass to avoid all traffic and get everywhere as fast as the speed limit" and not "it's a tax on your car".
It's also false that transit prices are small, by the way, at least globally. Where I live (third world), taking the subway daily to and from work amounts to 14% of minimum wage
Yes, transit costs a total X. In the car regime everyone puts in a small amount towards public transit and roads and richer folk put high amounts towards cars, totalling X. In the public transit regime everyone puts in a medium amount towards roads and public transit, and a negligible amount of tradespeople and construction companies buy their work vehicles, totalling X.
You can choose the car regime if you want, the US does, but: 1- public transit is lower quality due to higher income brackets choosing cars. 2- everyone is screwed by the cars' negative externalities (noise and air pollution mainly). 3- lower income brackets are screwed by the traffic generated by the higher guys (50 minimum wage workers occupying the same lane space as 3 SUV-driving middle managers). Also you have to remember how much the mortality increases in higher car traffic areas, so that X figure isn't really true
You shouldn't use X as your only variable as it sort of implies a fixed amount that is the same either way. However the systems are different and should have different costs.
That's just because the roads are built out by the Department of Transportation no?
Like if you had to drive on toll roads built underground then nobody would ever drive (see Hyperloop). I think the big mistake being made is people are arguing for free subways and really we should just go to free buses first.
I'm against free buses in general (though probably not in this particular case) because people want to get places. That money from bus fares should be put to running more buses (or building subways... lots of options, but more service). Nobody proposing free transit has ever proposed anywhere enough money that the city can run all needed services. They can maybe come up with enough money to continue current service, but every city in the world needs more transit service. You need service that can get you from where you are to where you want to be, when you want to go. Sometimes that place is farther away (but not unreasonably far) and you need high speed express service. Sometimes you are running late and miss the bus/train - is the next bus/train coming soon enough that you are not unreasonably late? Sometimes you need to be out late, is service still running? Sometimes you want to do something on a weekend. More service is needed everywhere and that lack of service is the primary reason people buy cars which are ready when people want to go (they claim otherwise but when I dig down it comes down to service)
Here in NYC the transit fare is about 35% of the minimum hourly wage for a round trip. I'd guess it's still cheaper than owning and maintaining a car though.
Minimum hourly wage is a terrible metric - very few people make that wage. In your areas where transit is most useful it is also the most economically productive so even less people are making minimum wage than the normal population. I don't the cities in question, but in general these days minimum wages is what you see paid in the economically depressed dying small towns, or people so disabled (generally mentally) that they cannot do your easiest fast food jobs.
How do costs compare for average people in that area is a much better metric. (understand that in transit areas I'd expect people with cars to have newer luxury cars, while in more car centric areas I'd expect more used non-luxury cars, and in poor areas worn out cars - which is itself a skew of the facts)
> Your transit operators need to ensure transit doesn't become too popular: the more people taking transit the less cars there are paying that tax.
So, raise the tax. When nobody takes cars any more you figure out another way to pay for it. The existence of cars shouldn't come at the cost of public services.
Public transit makes the most sense to fund with property taxes proportional to the benefit that public transit brings in.
> Public transit makes the most sense to fund with property taxes proportional to the benefit that public transit brings in.
Which is essentially zero in many cities. And even in cities with transit, an expansion should result in a lot more benefit than they are currently getting, but they need that money now not in 10 years after that expansion is done and the city sees that benefit.
??? How does this make any sense at all? You have no basically economy without transit. And you get a far greater return from mass transit than from roads.
> And even in cities with transit, an expansion should result in a lot more benefit than they are currently getting, but they need that money now not in 10 years after that expansion is done and the city sees that benefit.
Sure, and I'm just saying there's the rational impulse to tax cars to death and then enjoy the fruits of a mass transit network. The way we have things set up now doesn't make any sense to begin with—almost like we're taxing our economic centers for existing.
Yes. Economic centers need transport. Transport costs money to operate, so it is an external cost for an economic center. Taxes are a ways to price in external costs.
I completely agree. Free for the poor people but don't give free stuffs to the other people (including me). Public services are NEVER really free - they take $$ from taxes. Looks like many people simply don't care about taxes.
Roads are cheaper than transit as far as taxes go. Most of the costs of driving isn't supported by taxes - you buy and maintain your own car (the large share of the costs), and park in private parking lots. Transit not only needs the roads/rails (granted much less), but also needs to buy and maintain all the vehicles plus pay operators for them. The total costs of transit are far less, but the cost to governments is more.
Roads are much cheaper and more useful. They can be used for moving freight whereas good public transport keeps freight off the lines to avoid timetabling problems caused by blockage.
Or it means oil and automobiles are lucrative industries with huge amount of influence.
The reasoning of "we spend a lot of money so it must be good" is just bad. No, we spend a lot of money on stupid shit all the time. Both historically and currently.
The reason is they have no choice. Consumers are the bottom of the totem pole.
Americans spend on average 15% of their gross income on automobile transportation. That's not including their taxes that went towards said automobiles, roads, and oil.
Nobody actually wants to do that. If you could get to work without an automobile, you would. But you can't, can you?
Automobiles are parasidic in nature. To work, they require vast amounts of space and sprawling urban design. But when you get said vast amounts of space and sprawling urban design, then automobiles are the only thing that makes sense.
That's my point. Automobiles are much better than any other alternative.
We have a car centric built environment because people have rationally decided for many valid reasons that automobiles are the best way to get around. It's not because they are "parasitic", whatever that means.
Mass transit can be just as good as cars for most people at far less cost. For many people transit because it can avoid congestion and go faster than cars (even on an uncontested highway) transit should be better. However transit is lacking the network needed to make it that good.
Note that a large part of why cars are better is the network exists. If you had to drive on dirt (not even gravel!) roads that became impassible when it rains you would call cars a bad way to get around. However the road network is such that you can nearly anywhere in a car.
I would just propose that the transit advocates concentrate on that goal ("Mass transit can be just as good as cars for most people at far less cost") in one small area, because in most areas in the United States, it is currently extraordinarily far from reality.
Also, they should do this without crippling cars, since that would be far easier to do than producing a compelling alternative to them as they currently exist.
> Also, they should do this without crippling cars,
Do you mean without continuing to give them 99% of available resources? Cars are by far the most privileged form of transportation worldwide. We bend over backwards to subsidize them as much as possible at all costs.
So of course, any attempts at clawing back at least some of that privilege are met with outrage, e.g. bike lanes.
99% of what resources? That sounds like quite an exaggeration.
I don't know if cars are subsidized more than mass transit on average. It's quite possible they are. The overwhelming majority of people find cars much more useful and enjoyable than mass transit, and politicians have to provide people with what they want to some degree. It's not a conspiracy of the oil companies.
Rail freight is dying everywhere outside the USA, where passenger rail died instead. Mixing the two on the same lines is very difficult and causes tremendous problems, you can't even do it once passenger rail speeds get high enough. Rail freight has been uncompetitive with trucking for a long time as a result even though rail has huge subsidies and road traffic is a revenue generator for governments.
I think the biggest issue is cost. Also this is completely out of sense if the city doesn't have enough public transit. It's going to be outrageous in my city at least, and it already has a reasonably well public transit in NA.
> and making the traffic slower for the bus in doing so.
Strong agree except here, busses should have their own lanes at all expense to cars - even if this means entire roads are now no longer available to cars.
The private car should be the slowest, least convenient way to get where you're going.
We have dedicated bus lanes where I live, and they don't really work during heavy rush hour, unfortunately, due to merging and turns. For example, most of the time the bus lane needs to be on the right so it can pick people up, so cars turning right will have to cross the bus lane somewhere. The opposite happens if the bus needs to take a left turn, or if another bus is stopped for maintenance or something and overtaking is necessary.
Not to mention a lot of people figure out where the cameras are for the bus lane auto-fines and just dodge them when appropriate, but I guess that's a third world problem.
Actual Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems are in place all over the world, where there are physical barriers protecting the bus lane, and transit signal priority along the entire route. They work extremely well when they don't rely on motorists being on their best behavior.
Agree with dedicated bus lanes. But your attitude is problematic. You sounds like private cars are your enemies. Private car drivers, in a whole, are also public (just not public services). If you count them as your enemies, they will vote against you.
If you have this attitude, please never ever get into a private car. Good luck!
I drive a private motorcycle sometimes. It's not like I don't have empathy. I get it - the allure of the ultimately selfish option that puts your comfort and convenience over everyone else's. In abomination cities like Houston it's not like there's an alternative, and society kowtows to you so much as a driver it's no wonder why every driver parked on a sidewalk is confused as I explain to them why what they're doing is wrong. You can almost see their thoughts writ across their face: "but, there was no parking available, and this was free space. Free space in cities is... For cars..." Never mind they're about to get out of their car and become a pedestrian themselves!
Thanks for the warning, but a couple decades of activism has tought me long ago to let go of the idea of winning total support from the most strident opposition. Sometimes people just need to be dragged kicking and screaming into a better world for them and their neighbors. That's ok.
Why do we still allow drivers to externalize most of the costs associated with cars? There is existing technology to extract co2 from the atmosphere, and the current cost of this should be the free market-based price for co2 emissions.
I'm not sure if you're referring to the article, but that was about Ozone pollution.
In most countries cars are already taxed, in Switzerland as well. The tax is proportional to the weight of the car, so it compensates for higher fuel consumption. For similar reasons, EV's are taxed less.
In the UK, VED is based on the vehicle's CO2 emissions per kilometre traveled under prescribed driving conditions. This means the registered keepers of EVs (and some hybrid ICE/EVs) pay nothing.
There are talks about scrapping this system as more and more of the country transitions to EVs, and taxing them by vehicle weight instead (the same way driving licences are classed). This would reverse the current status quo, with EV owners paying the most due to the greater weight of their vehicles.
I'm not sure I like that idea, but I also appreciate that as the revenue goes down under the current scheme, they may feel tempted to introduce something even worse to make up the deficit instead, like a tax per mile traveled.
Some states in the US with large numbers of EV drivers are already kinda doing this. I now have to pay a flat EV tax on my registration, although it's still less than I'd pay annually in gas tax if I drove an ICE car.
And I don't believe any states manage to cover the full cost of just their infrastructure and upkeep through use taxes (gas tax, registration, tolls). Non-drivers still end up subsidizing the remainder.
EDIT: There is a fixed VAT charge of 5% on electricity, as well as a currently 16% levy on electricity to cover various environmental and social benefit schemes. Which is hilarious, as the UK is moving away from fossil fuels for its electrical generation mix, while taxing electricity consumption much more than it taxes gas (5% VAT and 5.5% levies). This punishes those using electricity for heating and incentivizes people to continue using gas at home. This is on top of the fact that currently, gas is much cheaper (in unit rate, per kWh) than electricity. It's like they can't make up their mind on what they want to accomplish. For fuel, the tax is currently just under £0.53/L with 20% VAT added on top of the total as well.
Exactly. Why do we need to come up with clever formulas to estimate car CO2 production based on car's gross weight, wheelbase, engine displacement, efficiency ratings if it's much easier to calculate how much CO2 is produced from the car's fuel?
PS: electricity is hard as there's a lot of volatile renewables, but I bet is still way easier than clever formulas.
Auto industry is pretty powerful, worldwide, but also particularly locally around Switzerland. I mean powerful enough to shape people's opinions and sway regulations.
Automobiles are extremely seductive. They offer a lot of benefit to an individual. The trouble comes when everyone is using cars, at which point their advantages to the individual are substantially diminished, and their harms to the populace substantially magnified. A thing like this is tough to stop, because by the time you really want to stop it, it's entrenched.
Governments do a lot of wildly unpopular things. I can't speak specifically for Switzerland, but one recent example is UK's Online Safety Act 2023. Even related to drivers, speed cameras are enabled despite being unpopular.
Unfortunately, that's not how Switzerland operates, because it's a very direct democracy where the status quo and the will of the majority takes priority over common sense and long term thinking. Full franchise (women being allowed to vote) didn't happen in all cantons until the 1990s (after it being made possible in the 1970s), because the existing voters (men) just voted against it.
That's because women themselves voted against it. Which is actually the history of the female franchise everywhere. The suffragettes were reduced to bombing campaigns because fellow women did not agree that women should be allowed to vote. In the UK it was only WW1 that changed things. Maybe in the UK female franchise would also have been much delayed if not for the huge social upheavals caused by the world wars.
> That's because women themselves voted against it
That's rather confusing. If women didn't have the right to vote, how would they be able to vote on the question of whether or not to grant women the right to vote?
Public opinion and newspaper influence. I think the idea that any policy is about a male/female divide is wrong. I also think, that women in the past having no influence on politics only because they weren't putting their name on documents, is flawed.
Yes, how horrible when people get to have a say. Where will this end? In the case of Switzerland, it's ending up as one of the wealthiest countries, with a median wealth of $182,248 per adult.
Also, since when is a political ruling class known for long-term thinking?
Besides, cars are already taxed based on weight/power (what you considered common sense).
I completely reject the notion that direct democracy is bad because Politicians Know Better. It’s borderline if not completely authoritarian and frankly disgusting.
Maybe consider that Switzerland is one of the best if not the best country in the world because people can choose what they want it to be.
This issue with direct democracies is that the they can get out of hand pretty fast unless your population is somewhat homogenous and reasonable. Aka Switzerland. If you're too young to remember twitch plays Pokémon, that's direct democracy and it was wild.
A direct democracy could decide tomorrow that we wanted to fuck China sideways with nukes because it's funny and based all because a tiktok went viral.
I think people rule differently depending on how much impact it has. People claiming "We should nuke them" knowing it will never happen is very different from them really deciding on that matter.
Even disregarding your quip about when women got the vote, your post reads like another anti-Western agenda post that has become very popular in the past two years.
Why do you double down on this when I specifically disregarded that aspect of your comment from my post?
And why is pointing out anti-Western agenda posts always met with multiple simultaneous downvotes, whereas my other unpopular opinions are downvoted one by one?
Perhaps folks don’t feel as if that’s what you’re actually pointing out. The post you replied to was referring to the direct democracy of Switzerland, not castigating all of Western society. I mean, from my point of view, by “disregarding” you basically ignored the entire point of the comment to support a narrative.
Because I (different person btw) was curious about whether it was true, that's all, no further "agenda". There's some discussion on the talk page btw about whether or not it is indeed attributable to direct democracy btw.
> And why is pointing out anti-Western agenda posts always met with multiple simultaneous downvotes
Maybe because acknowledging flaws in "y" is not necessarily "anti-y"? In fact, it is often "pro-y". I want to improve things I care about. A critical part of that is identifying flaws so they can be learned from and sometimes fixed.
It appears that 200,000 people live in Geneva, and daily there are 700,000 "boarding passengers" in Geneva, which I take to mean that if someone transfers a bus, they get counted twice. That said, I suspect based on these numbers that the vast majority of the population are also public transit users.
Geneva Metro area has a million people. Still could be a majority of people using public transit. If true, I suspect it's not the vast majority though Switzerland as a whole is still majority car commuters I think.
Source? As I understand it, co2 sequestration is still in R&D and not viable at scale. We can hit neutral, like a tree does, but that doesn't improve the situation. Like desalination, it sure seems like an easy problem but is not.
> As I understand it, co2 sequestration is still in R&D and not viable at scale.
I'm sure he knows. He's just tacitly saying cars should be defacto banned for anybody who's not a multimillionaire.
The reason this isn't done is because trying something like that is how you lose elections. So really it's a fantasy about having authoritarian control over everybody else.
Why single out cars? I may like using cars to get to destinations. Maybe you walk but do other things that have various environmental impacts like having kids or buying trendy clothes or pick something else. It seems unfair to let some people externalize their life’s costs but charge others.
> existing technology to extract co2 from the atmosphere
I wonder what would be the energy cost of onboard co2 extraction for vehicles? Could there be a theoretical automobile that used a carbon-oxygen cycle fuel but which emitted nothing, where a "gas station" would push fuel into the vehicle and then pull out the stored material that was formerly emissions?
This is a very naive take. For one, we don't do this because a lot of people in a lot of places have no other choice. Not everyone lives in a developed European country, good luck living without a car in Texas.
The reason we have so many cars in Texas is because we don't pay the costs.
Source: I live in Texas.
Part of the problem of automobiles is that we put the industry on such extreme welfare that it makes no sense to do anything else. If we remove that welfare, the industry will be forced to shift.
> a lot of people in a lot of places have no other choice. Not everyone lives in a developed European country
Then let's start with the people from developed European countries who can afford this and built it out from there. "I have no choice but to pollute your planet" is a bit of a thin argument to me, surely we can (as a society) find a way to make that not necessary. Collect funds, build the system we want, use it. That's the point of a government, it doesn't exist just because we like to pay taxes
Gas and cars are already heavily taxed. In California, for example, it's 61c per gallon now. I am not sure what's the situation in Switzerland, but last time I have been in Europe gas prices there was very significantly higher than in the US (even in California). Given as European gas doesn't seem to be a different product than US gas, I have to conclude Europeans already pay a lost of costs when buying gas. Same with car prices. So claiming car drivers do not pay the costs is just plain wrong.
> So claiming car drivers do not pay the costs is just plain wrong.
We can’t determine that that is the case simply because the cost seems like a lot. California has the highest gas taxes in the US, so even if California is correctly pricing the externalities of consuming a gallon of gas (which I very much doubt), the rest of the country is under-pricing those externalities. The EU has a minimum gas tax of $1.60 per gallon, so if they are correctly pricing the externalities, California must be under-pricing them by over half.
I'm not familiar with how things are done in Europe, but in the US fuel taxes aren't enough to pay for road maintenance, let alone new construction and externalities like pollution. New construction is typically mostly done with federal grants (newly printed money) and pollution we all just breathe.
It is a different product, across the world. In Sweden you can't buy anything below 95 octane whereas I've seen 89 in Australia and 87 seems to be common in USA according to Claude.
> An octane rating, or octane number, is a standard measure of a fuel's ability to withstand compression in an internal combustion engine without causing engine knocking. The higher the octane number, the more compression the fuel can withstand before detonating. Octane rating does not relate directly to the power output or the energy content of the fuel per unit mass or volume, but simply indicates the resistance to detonating under pressure without a spark.
It just lets higher performance cars achieve higher compression ratios. I believe technically this means it has a little bit less raw combustion potential the higher the octane rating. But none of this actually matters in practice as long as you feed your car what it asks for.
It means we can run higher compression in our engines without engine knock, which means we can run our turbos and timing harder on a smaller dispacement engine without ruining it, meaning more efficient engines.
Cleetus McFarland ran a car on brake-clean which has really low octane rating so sure anything works if you care about nothing. https://youtu.be/0hYOgGYQ_c8
American big block naturally aspirated engines will be tuned for crap fuel, if you've got a modern efficient turbo engine you should buy premium fuel to not ruin your engine.
I'd love to know which new big block naturally aspirated American cars don't recommend premium fuel. I think the low octane fuel is really only there for the older cars (and for folks who don't understand octane ratings).
Modern engines will pull back timing and decrease efficiency to prevent breaking down, raising the bar is in everyone's best interest, except the fat and happy Oil companies.
I live in Lausanne and also noticed that the air looks quite hazy these days.
But the MeteoSwiss weather app does not indicate any high levels of bad air quality.
Notably, ozone shows a value of 90µm/m^3 around Geneva. The article states 180µm/m^3.
All other index such as PM10 or NO2 are not crazy high either.
Switzerland has its act together with public transit as far as I'm aware, so the following doesn't actually apply to them. But something to note is that when trying to increase ridership the two most important things are reduced head times (ie a train shows up every 5 minutes, not every hour) and being consistently on-time. Only after those are sorted should transit look at eliminating fares. As if you eliminate fares first you're cutting into revenue that could be used to reduce head times and increase timeliness.
Ironically the small French cities next to Geneva are served by the TPG, the operator of busses in Geneva. And they don't have good coverage because of that.
They are the only public transportation available.
How effective do they expect a measure like this to be? Once a car and its insurance are paid for, the marginal cost of a single trip is quite low. I seriously wonder how many people woke up that day and thought "instead of driving I will take the train today because they are waiving the $3 fee" not many I bet. If we want to encourage people to take public transports we need to keep them competitive against the car at all times not one random week per year.
Maybe you don't see it, but many folks would value the pro-social benefit as being worth more than the marginal costs of driving a car. Like, for instance, if you're living through a spike in pollution, you may be motivated to do your part to help.
It might be enough to get someone to try transit and see that it actually does work. If you are used to driving everywhere and have never used transit then you won't actually know how it works. Routes, timing, transfers, missing the bus... - there are a lot of things that are different about using transit, none of it hard, but all of it needs to be learned. Free transit may be enough to get you to try it once (exactly once!), and if transit works that will be enough that you become willing to figure out how to buy the fare in the future.
In general free transit is a bad idea - nearly everybody is willing to pay a small fee for transit and what they really want is better service (better service meaning more routes, faster routes, and more frequent - pick as many as possible)
I think there is also a PR factor beyond the market economics of the $3 discount. Announcing the free transit alongside the pollution spike will get more people to read about it and consider whether they should make the choice to help with the pollution spike by taking transit.
There is also a bigger difference between free and $3 than between $3 and $6. Free means you don't have to buy a ticket, deal with the app or ticket machine, or have an existing public transit card. The "power of free" is worth considering here.
We often think of everyday behavior in terms of cost-benefit, but that's not all it is. Waiving the fee is a signal to indicate that taking public transit is socially desirable. That could be an effective nudge for many who are indecisive.
When I actually calculate the gas cost for a trip in a car, I am usually surprised at how large it can be. I wouldn’t be surprised if the $3 actually is less than the gas cost for many affected commutes.
However I think you are probably right that it won’t make much difference for a single week, since I think people tend to ignore this cost. Filling up the tank is infrequent enough and part of a routine that imo it doesn’t feel like a marginal cost and feels more like a fixed cost of car ownership
The $3 -> wouldn't motivate a lot of people, it's more like the cherry on top of asking folks nicely to drive less.
Like if you asked me to help you move a couch and offered me a beer, a beer isn't really a fair trade for the labor value, but I'm being nice and helping, a nice treat makes things a little better.
Cultural differences. Think of pandemic days, and how each country/city operated. Despite having almost no official lockdowns, Tokyo operated in self-induced lockdown style as people didn’t really want to exacerbate the problem. It was kind of the opposite in other places.
People in Switzerland might consider other things as the main goal (making the air cleaner), and this could be a simple nudge to change their behaviours. It’s not always monetary competitiveness that shapes behaviour.
This is excellent, but I always wonder at the way cities seem to bend over backwards for the worst technology for moving people ever invented, and don't dare do anything that deprioritizing the use of this technology.
Alongside a gorgeous canal, with bike lanes there as well as what appears to be a train station a few blocks away, as well as what may be some kind of street car station? I can't imagine a more phenomenal waste of space given the far superior transport options surrounding this area. Go west just a bit and you can see a much more useful use of that space: some greenspace https://maps.app.goo.gl/xmDdqxob4LegGvwt5 (I don't understand why this business' pin is there but so be it).
Go east a bit and see how an entire bridge is wasted on giving cars some complicated spaghetti to let them go either north or west. https://maps.app.goo.gl/GQNMabh7d9cEf7MC7 Instead that entire middle portion could be further bike parking (you can see some is already there) or a wonderful greenspace to enjoy the river as you cross the bridge. Hell, you could probably fit a few food stands there if you really wanted to get jiggy with it.
In the era of the hyperdense city and the perfections we've brought to non-car transportation technologies, it's time to let cars go. They were a bad idea, we can see that now from how they clog our cities, kill our kids, and cause us to choke on their exhaust, let's be done and aggressively remove them!
Edit: more examples, look to the river near here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/45iLSKpVa4kLwuM69 Everyone's view of the river spoiled, and precious space wasted, all so that 28 cars, just 28 cars, can park on the street.
Or, compare this neighborhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Xobo9E5jjQU2Pv2f8 to this one: https://maps.app.goo.gl/SAEYTGBqFDZXUkMn9 Note how much more dense, how much more housing and businesses, fit in the former, how much easier it is to walk around and get places. Notice how in the latter, they turn all their space in the pavilions into parking lots , whereas in the former, they use them for gardens and trees. The former is for humans, the latter is for cars, which aren't people! So why do we build a city for them?
> I always wonder at the way cities seem to bend over backwards for the worst technology for moving people ever invented, and don't dare do anything that deprioritizing the use of this technology.
I don’t get it - is your comment pro or anti public transportation :)
OK, imma just say the quiet part out loud here: There would be less need for daily transportation commutes if companies allowed 100% WFH wehre applicable and the government would force/incentivise this on companies for the positions that can be done remotely in order to save the environment. Especially given that Geneva labor market skews heavily towards specialized office jobs like diplomats, banking and pharma where most time is spent in front of the PC and on Teams/Zoom calls anyway.
But from my job search there and anecdotes from mates and the internet opinions, Swiss companies have a highly mandatory in-office culture, plus the cross-border commuters from neighboring countries who drive in and out every day to benefit both from high Swiss wages and also from the cheaper living abroad. Well then no shit Sherlock your air quality goes down the shitter.
So I doubt that the public transportation not being free is what caused the higher pollution in the first place, since people drive by car not because public transportation costs too much money, but because on their commute route, it saves a lot of time despite the extra cost of car ownership (you can make more money but you can't make more time).
To me, it just feels like another way for politicians washing their hands of the elephant in the room: the forced need to commute every day for jobs that don't need it. It seems like the lessons from the pandemic have been quickly forgotten since early to mid 2020 when everyone was locked in their homes had the best air quality we ever experienced, but somehow politicians can't put this 2 and 2 together and go fight made up strawmen instand.
Well put. Easy pollution-reducing policies are all under our noses but governments chicken out of implementing them for whatever reason. Office workers having at least one mandated day of remote work would be a godsend, and it's very noticeable post-pandemic how much nicer the cities where this is unofficially implemented are on fridays
> OK, imma just say the quiet part out loud here: There would be less need for daily transportation commutes if companies allowed 100% WFH wehre applicable and the government would force/incentivise this on companies for the positions that can be done remotely in order to save the environment.
Exactly. On the contrary, the politicians everywhere are pushing for return to office, or at least not promoting WFH. And then some people on HN just complain that private cars are enemies of the public service.
What do you mean "subsidizing private transport"? I'm sorry but "your tax" also includes the tax paid by people who drive private cars. And since most public transit companies don't break even anyway (at least in Canada), it is the private drivers that are paying for the public.
> I'm sorry but "your tax" also includes the tax paid by people who drive private cars.
Look up what % of infrastructure costs that tax covers wherever it is you live.
Surprised? Now consider that the infrastructure is just a tiny % of the overall cost. What about the whole car and gas supply chains? What about the externalities of burning so much fossil fuel every day? What about the healthcare costs of having to treat natural consequences of sedentary lifestyles? What about the opportunity costs of the loss of life due to the above and simply due to traffic deaths and injuries?
Did you miss the part about the roads for cars? If I don’t have a car I’m still paying for all the roads built and continuously maintained so that those with cars can drive them. So yeah, we are subsidizing private transport.
You are still depending on the roads for trucks that transport merchandises around and emergency vehicles and a lot of other stuffs. We are also paying for your public transit, thank you, because at least in my city it never breaks even, so everyone including us gets taxed -- but I have no issue with that -- I mostly take public transit anyway.
Sure, roads are multi-purpose. But if the roads were only used for public transport, transport of goods, and emergency vehicles, that would reduce wear and tear significantly and many might not even be needed. How much do you think road maintenance costs would drop by? Significantly. So that very large amount is being subsidized by taxes so people can drive private cars instead of taking public transport.
Yes, we as a US society are subsidizing private transport because "it's the American way". Other countries do this too but not to this extent. I'm in my 50s and never even owned a car until I moved back to the US ~7 years ago.
Careful with road wear and tear. Stress on the road goes as the 4th power of axle weight.
My car, a 2025 Hyundai Kona Electric SEL, weighs 3 800 pounds. Call it 4 000 when carrying one typical person. It has two axles so the axle weight is 2 000 pounds.
Let's call the amount of stress this puts on the road when driving from point A to point B 1 car's worth of stress.
Suppose we need to get 60 people from point A to point B. If we put them in 60 Konas that would result in 60 car's worth of stress.
A bit of Googling suggests that a typical 40-foot transit bus with 60 passengers would weigh around 36 000 pounds and has two axles which gives an axel weight of 18 000 pounds, which is 9 times that of the Kona.
The bus taking 60 people from A to B then will result in 9^4 car's worth of stress, which is a little over 6 500 car's worth of stress. That's a little over 100 times the stress from sending those people in 60 Konas.
There might be some differences due to other factors like tire types and speed, but the weight difference would be the dominant factor.
There are some good arguments for buses, but saving on road maintenance might not be one of them.
BTW, this outsized stress from heavy vehicles is also relevant to the ICE vs electric debate, since EVs usually weigh more than similar sized ICE cars.
For example the ICE version of the Kona is about 500 pounds lighter. The EV version should cause about 70% more stress on the road.
But wait! The ICE version needs gas, and gas is usually delivered to gas stations via tanker trucks. When the stress from that delivery of gas was taken into account it turned out that replacing ICE Konas with EV Konas would be a net reduction in road stress if the tanker truck that brought the gas had to drive more than just a few miles from wherever it gets filled up to the gas station.
Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs. Not saying it can be implemented right away, but it should be a policy goal for cities.
You have all the right in the world to prefer driving and chilling on your air conditioning and stereo if you can afford it, but it shouldn't be free if you're occupying the lane space 10 people would occupy in a bus, and making the traffic slower for the bus in doing so.
Completely agree with you. I live in Montpellier, France, and we have had free public transportation for a year and a half, and it's very good. I definitely use my car less and take public transport more often.
Everyone, including people without cars, pays for the roads through taxes; it is only fair to do the same for public transport.
Society pays for cars in a lot of ways other than just taxes. Roads/highways/parking takes up tons of valuable land (opportunity costs). Cars cause a lot of medical conditions, from respiratory/cardiovascular diseases, to obesity. Cars add to climate change, which causes extreme weather events. Congestion and noise impacts health and the economy, etc. Cities all around the world would be net improved with much fewer cars.
I don't want to comment on if it should be free or not, but public transit and micromobility should always be cheaper than owning+driving a car. Even with NYC's controversial new congestion pricing, it's still cheaper to drive your family to the city than to take them via train.
No it's absolutely not cheaper to drive your family into the city. You said owning+driving a car; did you really take into account ownership costs (maintenance, insurance etc) and driving costs (tolls, parking)? Just the cost of parking alone dwarfs the cost of the train.
A family of 4 is charged $2.90x2 in subway fares, which is more than the $15 congestion price for a car.
Sure but most families need a car anyway, and once you have one the costs of ownership, maintenance, insurance etc. are irrelevant to the costs of individual trips.
You want to buy a second-hand car. What's the first thing you check? Yep, the mileage. The cost of a car is basically down to its depreciation, which is basically down to its mileage.
Most families in NYC do not need to own a car, and in fact most don't.
But even then we have to consider marginal costs. Owning one car is better than two or three. Here in Texas, it's not uncommon to see households with 4 or 5 cars.
That's expensive.
According to this graphic https://www.hunterurban.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Car-L... 57.3% of children (0--18yo) are in a household with a car. There's a weighting issue here, but I'd still bet that most families in NYC have a car.
Commuting as one person from Mountain View to SF was cheaper with a car including the total ownership cost of the car, nevermind the reasonable discount for "stuff I wand to do with my car other than commute".
And riding caltrain during peak hours for an hour twice a day would violate the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.
Riding Caltrain during peak hours is totally fine and not unpleasant at all, particularly with the new trains (I do it most days and am writing this comment while doing so)
I left California before the new trains were a thing, but peak hours going north starting in Mountain View meant standing room only tightly packed on the world's more unstable train cars.
I took Caltrain regularly pre-pandemic when I had a job in Palo Alto and going to SF. It was not bad at all. Other cities like NYC had way more packed trains.
> Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs
Strongly disagree. There are too many perverse incentives that work against transit. If there are a lot of car commuters (which there will be - plumbers taking their tools to the job for example) they have inventive to pressure politicians to reduce that tax - any voting block will always be more powerful than the distributed masses. Your transit operators need to ensure transit doesn't become too popular: the more people taking transit the less cars there are paying that tax.
Besides almost no transit rider is worried about costs. They are all interested instead in better service, so use all the money you can get - including fares - to build better service. This is long term what everyone needs.
Yes you do need a program for the poor. However the majority of your people shouldn't be in that program.
I'm going to guess that you're a fellow American. That's our answer to everything - build a ghetto. Why make anything nice for everybody when you can make it suck for 79% of us, Hell on Earth for another 20+%, and nice for the privileged few?
Most ghettos aren't built to be ghettos. They were built as nice neighborhoods and have nothing structurally wrong with them, but then had criminals and shitbags wreck the place. Ghettoification can in fact be reversed without any changes to infrastructure by simply having nice people move in who give a shit and make an effort to clean up and maintain their properties. This is derogatorily called "gentrification".
Also, your ratios are absurdly out of wack. 79% of the country doesn't live in a ghetto and you don't need to be economically or socially privileged to maintain a nice neighborhood. Most working class neighborhoods are not ghettos, nor even resemble one in the slightest.
The ghetto is that bottom 20% living in Hell, not the 79% who merely deal with things that suck.
Although I was more referring to our systems more broadly (health care, education, transportation - the topic of this post), let's go with neighborhoods. Are you really trying to pretend that red-lining didn't happen? Or that de facto sundown towns didn't exist at least into the 1980s?
While things are bad for some people, calling the bottom 20% living in Hell is an exaggeration that is nowhere near correct. People always complain about their situation and think it is somehow much worse than other people, so if you see someone who is in worse shape you can think it is a living hell. However the reality is very different, and if you step back and look you discover most people in that bottom 20% are happy overall despite having imperfections.
I mean in the US a bunch of them are still the remaining product of redlining policies where racial minorities were allowed to live but banks would not give loans. Housing segregation was planned and enforced. That sounds a lot like intentional creation of a ghetto. And later when cities need to invest in building amenities, or raze neighborhoods to make way for infrastructure, often it's been the minority neighborhoods that are neglected or destroyed respectively. Of _course_ ghettos are the result of planning and intentional policy.
Which is a more likely explanation for why banks did not make loans in redlined neighborhoods?
A) Every bank is run by racists who are sufficiently racist to ignore a profit opportunity
B) The neighborhoods are bad credit risks
To be very clear, redlining didn't happen just because a bunch of individual bankers happened to be racist. It was a consequence of federal policy -- the FHA would insure loans in white neighborhoods but not in minority neighborhoods, so even for a rational banker uninterested in race, it made sense to issue the loans for white home buyers, and not minority home buyers, even if they were financially qualified. The "redline" choices were not where a bunch of separate banks had independently decided that some "bad risk" threshold was crossed -- they were picked by HOLC/FHA. The FHA also subsidized construction of white housing developments, but not minority ones.
When people refer to "systemic racism", the "systemic" part is typically literal.
Also, I invite you to take a step back and interrogate the examine the implicit premises of your question. I think you're saying that _in a free market of rational agents_, it doesn't make economic sense to not issue loans to people who _aren't_ credit risks, and I would agree -- except housing segregation was always about a heavily artificially manipulated (not free) market, in which people of color couldn't purchase a home in a white neighborhood regardless of their willingness to pay. Public policy bent over backwards to coerce all parties to maintain segregation (e.g. sundown towns, racial covenants, etc), ironically including during cold-war years when the US simultaneously tried to be a global advocate for free markets.
Do you mean today or in 1950? In 1950 I'll go with racists for the majority of banks. Today race is not a factor, but credit risks are still important.
You only need one bank to seize the profit by making a loan. Every single bank was motivated by racism to deny profitable loans?
If your public transport is so popular that it's becoming infeasible to fund it from car taxes... mission fucking accomplished! That is such a wild and nonsensical fear. "But what if it's too successful?!"
Eh no, that is an actual failure mode. Germany is experiencing it right now. What it means is everyone ends up being forced to use horribly broken public transport and it screws up everyone's business and personal lives.
It is possible for public transport to be too popular. It looks like overloaded, crowded and constantly broken lines that can't get better because they're starved of funding.
Public transport being massively/too popular is the only way for it to get anywhere near the level of funding it needs. That's not really a failure mode, just a symptom of the real failure. It was extremely easy for governments to ignore it and leave it to rot for decades because it had next to no lobby compared to cars.
The 9€ and Deutschlandticket reinvigorated that lobby - although that's being snuffed out again.
Looking at the Swedish railway, the issue is related to budget but the problem is not that simple. The main issue is that the railway system lacks redundancy in track capacity, meaning that any failure require short term fixes in order to reduce short term losses. Those short term fixes eventually leads to overall higher downtime and higher failure rates, which only lead to a even more focus on quick fixes and shoddy repairs. Building out new capacity becomes too expensive and takes too long time, and takes money from the budget that is needed to do all the quick fixes that pop up. When those lines become too popular, the pressure only increases to continue do quick fixes, since any downtime has even larger impact both on the straining cargo traffic and passenger throughput.
It becomes like the meme when people talk about nuclear power. Sure, it would had been an good idea 10-20 years ago, but there is no time to do it now and it cost too much. Next year will be even later, and it will cost even more. Any new funding need to be channeled directly to the starving short-term budget, which will continue to always be too low on funding.
One differente with nuclear power is that today we have a better option - renewables - and so nuclear doesn't make sense at all any price. By contrast we don't have anything completely better than mass transit for some cases and to it makes sense to build it and make it cheaper.
This is backwards. The public transit lobby is the Green/climate lobby which is absolutely massive and incredibly influential because it peddles to politicians a unifying moral story about the end of the world that justifies unlimited exercise of political power.
What does the auto industry have in response? Jobs? The left don't care about jobs to begin with, they view anything linked to capitalism or employers to be inherently suspicious.
To see this is true, just look at which group is a net tax payer vs net tax recipient. Car drivers subsidize public transport everywhere I know of (unless you get into stupid arguments that assume world peace exists solely for the purpose of oil transport).
Much of the green mokement is a hypocrite that wants to appear green- but don't take their cars or gas away. And so polititians exploit that to build minimal transit - enough to look like they did something but not enough to take away cars.
Budget for German train system has been cut and was too low for two decades. It was well known that would result in what we have today.
You have to invest in infrastructure to keep it at a high quality level. It's crowded because it has been lacking proper funding for years. It's a result of politics, nothing stops public transport from being popular and providing reasonable high quality service.
Inability to competently manage finances within the framework of populist democratic politics is one of the top reasons governments suck at running things and "public *" often ends in failure.
I don't know much about what Germany is experiencing, but even Germany's neighbors in the Netherlands and France seem to be having a renaissance predicated upon getting people out of their personal automobiles. Perhaps the problem is actually the outsized influence of the auto industry in Germany?
No, auto industry is dying in Germany and was more powerful in the past. German railway collapse is a recent phenomenon. It's the inverse: the Green push to make everyone use public transport is collapsing both the auto industry and public transit there.
Wow, that first paragraph is a compelling political economy argument against this policy that I hadn't really thought of. Your model seems to take the assumptions that the trade industries can't reorganize to optimize car usage, and that transit operators have only one stream of income (the car tax).
Both are untrue, IMO, and in the desired steady state the car tax is in fact near zero, substituted by higher taxes on everything else. Even if that ends up making the city more expensive, the variation in utility is still at least positive if we model citizens' utility functions as negatively sloped on the pollution axis, and of course if we are assuming the central planning wants to comply with global warming goals.
I would even question if tradespeople would be against paying the car tax if it gets commuters out of the road, to be honest. I'd wager a plumber would be more than willing to pay even 100$ monthly if you worded it as "you get a fast pass to avoid all traffic and get everywhere as fast as the speed limit" and not "it's a tax on your car".
It's also false that transit prices are small, by the way, at least globally. Where I live (third world), taking the subway daily to and from work amounts to 14% of minimum wage
Cars cost more than transit for most people. However transit is expensive no matter how you look at it. The money to run it much come from someplace.
Yes, transit costs a total X. In the car regime everyone puts in a small amount towards public transit and roads and richer folk put high amounts towards cars, totalling X. In the public transit regime everyone puts in a medium amount towards roads and public transit, and a negligible amount of tradespeople and construction companies buy their work vehicles, totalling X.
You can choose the car regime if you want, the US does, but: 1- public transit is lower quality due to higher income brackets choosing cars. 2- everyone is screwed by the cars' negative externalities (noise and air pollution mainly). 3- lower income brackets are screwed by the traffic generated by the higher guys (50 minimum wage workers occupying the same lane space as 3 SUV-driving middle managers). Also you have to remember how much the mortality increases in higher car traffic areas, so that X figure isn't really true
You shouldn't use X as your only variable as it sort of implies a fixed amount that is the same either way. However the systems are different and should have different costs.
That's just because the roads are built out by the Department of Transportation no?
Like if you had to drive on toll roads built underground then nobody would ever drive (see Hyperloop). I think the big mistake being made is people are arguing for free subways and really we should just go to free buses first.
I'm against free buses in general (though probably not in this particular case) because people want to get places. That money from bus fares should be put to running more buses (or building subways... lots of options, but more service). Nobody proposing free transit has ever proposed anywhere enough money that the city can run all needed services. They can maybe come up with enough money to continue current service, but every city in the world needs more transit service. You need service that can get you from where you are to where you want to be, when you want to go. Sometimes that place is farther away (but not unreasonably far) and you need high speed express service. Sometimes you are running late and miss the bus/train - is the next bus/train coming soon enough that you are not unreasonably late? Sometimes you need to be out late, is service still running? Sometimes you want to do something on a weekend. More service is needed everywhere and that lack of service is the primary reason people buy cars which are ready when people want to go (they claim otherwise but when I dig down it comes down to service)
Here in NYC the transit fare is about 35% of the minimum hourly wage for a round trip. I'd guess it's still cheaper than owning and maintaining a car though.
Minimum hourly wage is a terrible metric - very few people make that wage. In your areas where transit is most useful it is also the most economically productive so even less people are making minimum wage than the normal population. I don't the cities in question, but in general these days minimum wages is what you see paid in the economically depressed dying small towns, or people so disabled (generally mentally) that they cannot do your easiest fast food jobs.
How do costs compare for average people in that area is a much better metric. (understand that in transit areas I'd expect people with cars to have newer luxury cars, while in more car centric areas I'd expect more used non-luxury cars, and in poor areas worn out cars - which is itself a skew of the facts)
As opposed to the automobile and petroleum industries, who famously have no perverse incentives.
> Your transit operators need to ensure transit doesn't become too popular: the more people taking transit the less cars there are paying that tax.
So, raise the tax. When nobody takes cars any more you figure out another way to pay for it. The existence of cars shouldn't come at the cost of public services.
Public transit makes the most sense to fund with property taxes proportional to the benefit that public transit brings in.
> Public transit makes the most sense to fund with property taxes proportional to the benefit that public transit brings in.
Which is essentially zero in many cities. And even in cities with transit, an expansion should result in a lot more benefit than they are currently getting, but they need that money now not in 10 years after that expansion is done and the city sees that benefit.
> Which is essentially zero in many cities.
??? How does this make any sense at all? You have no basically economy without transit. And you get a far greater return from mass transit than from roads.
> And even in cities with transit, an expansion should result in a lot more benefit than they are currently getting, but they need that money now not in 10 years after that expansion is done and the city sees that benefit.
This is what bonds are for....
When I said transit I mean mass transit. Most people do not refer to roads as transit even though they are part of your transportation network.
Sure, and I'm just saying there's the rational impulse to tax cars to death and then enjoy the fruits of a mass transit network. The way we have things set up now doesn't make any sense to begin with—almost like we're taxing our economic centers for existing.
> we're taxing our economic centers for existing.
Yes. Economic centers need transport. Transport costs money to operate, so it is an external cost for an economic center. Taxes are a ways to price in external costs.
I completely agree. Free for the poor people but don't give free stuffs to the other people (including me). Public services are NEVER really free - they take $$ from taxes. Looks like many people simply don't care about taxes.
You either spend the tax money on roads, or on public transit. Roads aren't free either.
Roads are cheaper than transit as far as taxes go. Most of the costs of driving isn't supported by taxes - you buy and maintain your own car (the large share of the costs), and park in private parking lots. Transit not only needs the roads/rails (granted much less), but also needs to buy and maintain all the vehicles plus pay operators for them. The total costs of transit are far less, but the cost to governments is more.
Roads are much cheaper and more useful. They can be used for moving freight whereas good public transport keeps freight off the lines to avoid timetabling problems caused by blockage.
They're not cheaper, that's an illusion and lie sold by the automobile and petroleum industries.
The interstates in the US alone have costed more than 25 trillion dollars. That's just the interstates, no other highways or roads.
But none of that even considers cost of using said roads. In the US, on average 15% of gross income is spent on automobile transportation.
That's a 15% tax right off the top, before your other taxes.
That spending pattern means that automobile transportation is very valuable compared to alternatives.
Or it means oil and automobiles are lucrative industries with huge amount of influence.
The reasoning of "we spend a lot of money so it must be good" is just bad. No, we spend a lot of money on stupid shit all the time. Both historically and currently.
I don't think people are as foolish as that when spending large amounts of their own money. There must be a good reason for it.
The reason is they have no choice. Consumers are the bottom of the totem pole.
Americans spend on average 15% of their gross income on automobile transportation. That's not including their taxes that went towards said automobiles, roads, and oil.
Nobody actually wants to do that. If you could get to work without an automobile, you would. But you can't, can you?
Automobiles are parasidic in nature. To work, they require vast amounts of space and sprawling urban design. But when you get said vast amounts of space and sprawling urban design, then automobiles are the only thing that makes sense.
That's my point. Automobiles are much better than any other alternative.
We have a car centric built environment because people have rationally decided for many valid reasons that automobiles are the best way to get around. It's not because they are "parasitic", whatever that means.
Mass transit can be just as good as cars for most people at far less cost. For many people transit because it can avoid congestion and go faster than cars (even on an uncontested highway) transit should be better. However transit is lacking the network needed to make it that good.
Note that a large part of why cars are better is the network exists. If you had to drive on dirt (not even gravel!) roads that became impassible when it rains you would call cars a bad way to get around. However the road network is such that you can nearly anywhere in a car.
I would just propose that the transit advocates concentrate on that goal ("Mass transit can be just as good as cars for most people at far less cost") in one small area, because in most areas in the United States, it is currently extraordinarily far from reality.
Also, they should do this without crippling cars, since that would be far easier to do than producing a compelling alternative to them as they currently exist.
Most who look like transit advocates in reality are not . They appear to be for transit but they want something else and don't care about transit.
> Also, they should do this without crippling cars,
Do you mean without continuing to give them 99% of available resources? Cars are by far the most privileged form of transportation worldwide. We bend over backwards to subsidize them as much as possible at all costs.
So of course, any attempts at clawing back at least some of that privilege are met with outrage, e.g. bike lanes.
99% of what resources? That sounds like quite an exaggeration.
I don't know if cars are subsidized more than mass transit on average. It's quite possible they are. The overwhelming majority of people find cars much more useful and enjoyable than mass transit, and politicians have to provide people with what they want to some degree. It's not a conspiracy of the oil companies.
A good reason for a SUV in a city is a pretty subjective matter so I don't think that alone is a good argument.
Rails can and are used to transport freight. Trucks contribute a lot to bad traffic and therefore the same kind of blockage you mentioned.
Rail freight is dying everywhere outside the USA, where passenger rail died instead. Mixing the two on the same lines is very difficult and causes tremendous problems, you can't even do it once passenger rail speeds get high enough. Rail freight has been uncompetitive with trucking for a long time as a result even though rail has huge subsidies and road traffic is a revenue generator for governments.
I think the biggest issue is cost. Also this is completely out of sense if the city doesn't have enough public transit. It's going to be outrageous in my city at least, and it already has a reasonably well public transit in NA.
> and making the traffic slower for the bus in doing so.
Strong agree except here, busses should have their own lanes at all expense to cars - even if this means entire roads are now no longer available to cars.
The private car should be the slowest, least convenient way to get where you're going.
We have dedicated bus lanes where I live, and they don't really work during heavy rush hour, unfortunately, due to merging and turns. For example, most of the time the bus lane needs to be on the right so it can pick people up, so cars turning right will have to cross the bus lane somewhere. The opposite happens if the bus needs to take a left turn, or if another bus is stopped for maintenance or something and overtaking is necessary.
Not to mention a lot of people figure out where the cameras are for the bus lane auto-fines and just dodge them when appropriate, but I guess that's a third world problem.
Actual Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems are in place all over the world, where there are physical barriers protecting the bus lane, and transit signal priority along the entire route. They work extremely well when they don't rely on motorists being on their best behavior.
If they don't work where you live, it's because they are poorly designed.
Agree with dedicated bus lanes. But your attitude is problematic. You sounds like private cars are your enemies. Private car drivers, in a whole, are also public (just not public services). If you count them as your enemies, they will vote against you.
If you have this attitude, please never ever get into a private car. Good luck!
I drive a private motorcycle sometimes. It's not like I don't have empathy. I get it - the allure of the ultimately selfish option that puts your comfort and convenience over everyone else's. In abomination cities like Houston it's not like there's an alternative, and society kowtows to you so much as a driver it's no wonder why every driver parked on a sidewalk is confused as I explain to them why what they're doing is wrong. You can almost see their thoughts writ across their face: "but, there was no parking available, and this was free space. Free space in cities is... For cars..." Never mind they're about to get out of their car and become a pedestrian themselves!
Thanks for the warning, but a couple decades of activism has tought me long ago to let go of the idea of winning total support from the most strident opposition. Sometimes people just need to be dragged kicking and screaming into a better world for them and their neighbors. That's ok.
Why do we still allow drivers to externalize most of the costs associated with cars? There is existing technology to extract co2 from the atmosphere, and the current cost of this should be the free market-based price for co2 emissions.
I'm not sure if you're referring to the article, but that was about Ozone pollution.
In most countries cars are already taxed, in Switzerland as well. The tax is proportional to the weight of the car, so it compensates for higher fuel consumption. For similar reasons, EV's are taxed less.
In the UK, VED is based on the vehicle's CO2 emissions per kilometre traveled under prescribed driving conditions. This means the registered keepers of EVs (and some hybrid ICE/EVs) pay nothing.
There are talks about scrapping this system as more and more of the country transitions to EVs, and taxing them by vehicle weight instead (the same way driving licences are classed). This would reverse the current status quo, with EV owners paying the most due to the greater weight of their vehicles.
I'm not sure I like that idea, but I also appreciate that as the revenue goes down under the current scheme, they may feel tempted to introduce something even worse to make up the deficit instead, like a tax per mile traveled.
Some states in the US with large numbers of EV drivers are already kinda doing this. I now have to pay a flat EV tax on my registration, although it's still less than I'd pay annually in gas tax if I drove an ICE car.
Those taxes pay for road upkeep, as well as other state programs, but not carbon sequestration.
And I don't believe any states manage to cover the full cost of just their infrastructure and upkeep through use taxes (gas tax, registration, tolls). Non-drivers still end up subsidizing the remainder.
Just tax fuel/electricity instead of car.
We also tax those already.
EDIT: There is a fixed VAT charge of 5% on electricity, as well as a currently 16% levy on electricity to cover various environmental and social benefit schemes. Which is hilarious, as the UK is moving away from fossil fuels for its electrical generation mix, while taxing electricity consumption much more than it taxes gas (5% VAT and 5.5% levies). This punishes those using electricity for heating and incentivizes people to continue using gas at home. This is on top of the fact that currently, gas is much cheaper (in unit rate, per kWh) than electricity. It's like they can't make up their mind on what they want to accomplish. For fuel, the tax is currently just under £0.53/L with 20% VAT added on top of the total as well.
Exactly. Why do we need to come up with clever formulas to estimate car CO2 production based on car's gross weight, wheelbase, engine displacement, efficiency ratings if it's much easier to calculate how much CO2 is produced from the car's fuel?
PS: electricity is hard as there's a lot of volatile renewables, but I bet is still way easier than clever formulas.
Tax them again!
Auto industry is pretty powerful, worldwide, but also particularly locally around Switzerland. I mean powerful enough to shape people's opinions and sway regulations.
That is crazy to me that the country with a national identity built around trains also has a powerful car lobby. You really can’t escape it.
Automobiles are extremely seductive. They offer a lot of benefit to an individual. The trouble comes when everyone is using cars, at which point their advantages to the individual are substantially diminished, and their harms to the populace substantially magnified. A thing like this is tough to stop, because by the time you really want to stop it, it's entrenched.
Because drivers are still a majority of the population, so this would be wildly unpopular
Governments do a lot of wildly unpopular things. I can't speak specifically for Switzerland, but one recent example is UK's Online Safety Act 2023. Even related to drivers, speed cameras are enabled despite being unpopular.
Unfortunately, that's not how Switzerland operates, because it's a very direct democracy where the status quo and the will of the majority takes priority over common sense and long term thinking. Full franchise (women being allowed to vote) didn't happen in all cantons until the 1990s (after it being made possible in the 1970s), because the existing voters (men) just voted against it.
That's because women themselves voted against it. Which is actually the history of the female franchise everywhere. The suffragettes were reduced to bombing campaigns because fellow women did not agree that women should be allowed to vote. In the UK it was only WW1 that changed things. Maybe in the UK female franchise would also have been much delayed if not for the huge social upheavals caused by the world wars.
> That's because women themselves voted against it
That's rather confusing. If women didn't have the right to vote, how would they be able to vote on the question of whether or not to grant women the right to vote?
Public opinion and newspaper influence. I think the idea that any policy is about a male/female divide is wrong. I also think, that women in the past having no influence on politics only because they weren't putting their name on documents, is flawed.
Yes, how horrible when people get to have a say. Where will this end? In the case of Switzerland, it's ending up as one of the wealthiest countries, with a median wealth of $182,248 per adult.
Also, since when is a political ruling class known for long-term thinking?
Besides, cars are already taxed based on weight/power (what you considered common sense).
I completely reject the notion that direct democracy is bad because Politicians Know Better. It’s borderline if not completely authoritarian and frankly disgusting.
Maybe consider that Switzerland is one of the best if not the best country in the world because people can choose what they want it to be.
This issue with direct democracies is that the they can get out of hand pretty fast unless your population is somewhat homogenous and reasonable. Aka Switzerland. If you're too young to remember twitch plays Pokémon, that's direct democracy and it was wild.
A direct democracy could decide tomorrow that we wanted to fuck China sideways with nukes because it's funny and based all because a tiktok went viral.
I think people rule differently depending on how much impact it has. People claiming "We should nuke them" knowing it will never happen is very different from them really deciding on that matter.
Even disregarding your quip about when women got the vote, your post reads like another anti-Western agenda post that has become very popular in the past two years.
It's true though, quite amazingly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...
Why do you double down on this when I specifically disregarded that aspect of your comment from my post?
And why is pointing out anti-Western agenda posts always met with multiple simultaneous downvotes, whereas my other unpopular opinions are downvoted one by one?
And why is pointing out anti-Western agenda…
Perhaps folks don’t feel as if that’s what you’re actually pointing out. The post you replied to was referring to the direct democracy of Switzerland, not castigating all of Western society. I mean, from my point of view, by “disregarding” you basically ignored the entire point of the comment to support a narrative.
Because I (different person btw) was curious about whether it was true, that's all, no further "agenda". There's some discussion on the talk page btw about whether or not it is indeed attributable to direct democracy btw.
> And why is pointing out anti-Western agenda posts always met with multiple simultaneous downvotes
Maybe because acknowledging flaws in "y" is not necessarily "anti-y"? In fact, it is often "pro-y". I want to improve things I care about. A critical part of that is identifying flaws so they can be learned from and sometimes fixed.
It appears that 200,000 people live in Geneva, and daily there are 700,000 "boarding passengers" in Geneva, which I take to mean that if someone transfers a bus, they get counted twice. That said, I suspect based on these numbers that the vast majority of the population are also public transit users.
https://opendata.tpg.ch/pages/accueil/
Geneva Metro area has a million people. Still could be a majority of people using public transit. If true, I suspect it's not the vast majority though Switzerland as a whole is still majority car commuters I think.
> There is existing technology to extract co2
Source? As I understand it, co2 sequestration is still in R&D and not viable at scale. We can hit neutral, like a tree does, but that doesn't improve the situation. Like desalination, it sure seems like an easy problem but is not.
> As I understand it, co2 sequestration is still in R&D and not viable at scale.
I'm sure he knows. He's just tacitly saying cars should be defacto banned for anybody who's not a multimillionaire.
The reason this isn't done is because trying something like that is how you lose elections. So really it's a fantasy about having authoritarian control over everybody else.
Why single out cars? I may like using cars to get to destinations. Maybe you walk but do other things that have various environmental impacts like having kids or buying trendy clothes or pick something else. It seems unfair to let some people externalize their life’s costs but charge others.
If you like it so much, you should be willing to pay for the externalities.
Nobody said to not apply the same elsewhere...
I'm not sure I trust either consumers or market effects well enough to rationally move away from car usage.
> existing technology to extract co2 from the atmosphere
I wonder what would be the energy cost of onboard co2 extraction for vehicles? Could there be a theoretical automobile that used a carbon-oxygen cycle fuel but which emitted nothing, where a "gas station" would push fuel into the vehicle and then pull out the stored material that was formerly emissions?
This is a very naive take. For one, we don't do this because a lot of people in a lot of places have no other choice. Not everyone lives in a developed European country, good luck living without a car in Texas.
The reason we have so many cars in Texas is because we don't pay the costs.
Source: I live in Texas.
Part of the problem of automobiles is that we put the industry on such extreme welfare that it makes no sense to do anything else. If we remove that welfare, the industry will be forced to shift.
> a lot of people in a lot of places have no other choice. Not everyone lives in a developed European country
Then let's start with the people from developed European countries who can afford this and built it out from there. "I have no choice but to pollute your planet" is a bit of a thin argument to me, surely we can (as a society) find a way to make that not necessary. Collect funds, build the system we want, use it. That's the point of a government, it doesn't exist just because we like to pay taxes
I am not arguing against cars. I am just arguing against the "right" to pollute the environment without taking responsibility for adequate cleanup.
Gas and cars are already heavily taxed. In California, for example, it's 61c per gallon now. I am not sure what's the situation in Switzerland, but last time I have been in Europe gas prices there was very significantly higher than in the US (even in California). Given as European gas doesn't seem to be a different product than US gas, I have to conclude Europeans already pay a lost of costs when buying gas. Same with car prices. So claiming car drivers do not pay the costs is just plain wrong.
> So claiming car drivers do not pay the costs is just plain wrong.
We can’t determine that that is the case simply because the cost seems like a lot. California has the highest gas taxes in the US, so even if California is correctly pricing the externalities of consuming a gallon of gas (which I very much doubt), the rest of the country is under-pricing those externalities. The EU has a minimum gas tax of $1.60 per gallon, so if they are correctly pricing the externalities, California must be under-pricing them by over half.
That 61 cents doesn’t even come close to covering road maintenance, let alone pollution and every other negative externality of personal car use.
I'm not familiar with how things are done in Europe, but in the US fuel taxes aren't enough to pay for road maintenance, let alone new construction and externalities like pollution. New construction is typically mostly done with federal grants (newly printed money) and pollution we all just breathe.
According to the Swiss government that's actually the case there: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/mobility-tra...
"Degree of coverage of motorised road traffic infrastructure costs: 111%"
California doesn't even have the same kind of gas as other US states. Supply is limited due to only a subset of refineries that can produce it.
Gasoline is regulated both by federal, local, and state laws.
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/fuels-enforcment-pr...
https://www.wearethepractitioners.com/index.php/topics/art-a...
It is a different product, across the world. In Sweden you can't buy anything below 95 octane whereas I've seen 89 in Australia and 87 seems to be common in USA according to Claude.
Editorialized: US "gas" is cheap crap
> An octane rating, or octane number, is a standard measure of a fuel's ability to withstand compression in an internal combustion engine without causing engine knocking. The higher the octane number, the more compression the fuel can withstand before detonating. Octane rating does not relate directly to the power output or the energy content of the fuel per unit mass or volume, but simply indicates the resistance to detonating under pressure without a spark.
from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating
It just lets higher performance cars achieve higher compression ratios. I believe technically this means it has a little bit less raw combustion potential the higher the octane rating. But none of this actually matters in practice as long as you feed your car what it asks for.
It means we can run higher compression in our engines without engine knock, which means we can run our turbos and timing harder on a smaller dispacement engine without ruining it, meaning more efficient engines.
Cleetus McFarland ran a car on brake-clean which has really low octane rating so sure anything works if you care about nothing. https://youtu.be/0hYOgGYQ_c8
American big block naturally aspirated engines will be tuned for crap fuel, if you've got a modern efficient turbo engine you should buy premium fuel to not ruin your engine.
I'd love to know which new big block naturally aspirated American cars don't recommend premium fuel. I think the low octane fuel is really only there for the older cars (and for folks who don't understand octane ratings).
Recommendations only do so much, 80% of sales are crap fuel.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1270-dece...
Modern engines will pull back timing and decrease efficiency to prevent breaking down, raising the bar is in everyone's best interest, except the fat and happy Oil companies.
I live in Lausanne and also noticed that the air looks quite hazy these days. But the MeteoSwiss weather app does not indicate any high levels of bad air quality. Notably, ozone shows a value of 90µm/m^3 around Geneva. The article states 180µm/m^3.
All other index such as PM10 or NO2 are not crazy high either.
Switzerland has its act together with public transit as far as I'm aware, so the following doesn't actually apply to them. But something to note is that when trying to increase ridership the two most important things are reduced head times (ie a train shows up every 5 minutes, not every hour) and being consistently on-time. Only after those are sorted should transit look at eliminating fares. As if you eliminate fares first you're cutting into revenue that could be used to reduce head times and increase timeliness.
For the record this is already par for the course for all the French cities surrounding Geneve.
Yes, true here in Lyon, 2hrs away from Geneva.
Is it true in Lyon? I was under the impression that there was a special ticket to buy on peak pollution days but it was not free.
Ironically the small French cities next to Geneva are served by the TPG, the operator of busses in Geneva. And they don't have good coverage because of that.
They are the only public transportation available.
How effective do they expect a measure like this to be? Once a car and its insurance are paid for, the marginal cost of a single trip is quite low. I seriously wonder how many people woke up that day and thought "instead of driving I will take the train today because they are waiving the $3 fee" not many I bet. If we want to encourage people to take public transports we need to keep them competitive against the car at all times not one random week per year.
Maybe you don't see it, but many folks would value the pro-social benefit as being worth more than the marginal costs of driving a car. Like, for instance, if you're living through a spike in pollution, you may be motivated to do your part to help.
It might be enough to get someone to try transit and see that it actually does work. If you are used to driving everywhere and have never used transit then you won't actually know how it works. Routes, timing, transfers, missing the bus... - there are a lot of things that are different about using transit, none of it hard, but all of it needs to be learned. Free transit may be enough to get you to try it once (exactly once!), and if transit works that will be enough that you become willing to figure out how to buy the fare in the future.
In general free transit is a bad idea - nearly everybody is willing to pay a small fee for transit and what they really want is better service (better service meaning more routes, faster routes, and more frequent - pick as many as possible)
I think there is also a PR factor beyond the market economics of the $3 discount. Announcing the free transit alongside the pollution spike will get more people to read about it and consider whether they should make the choice to help with the pollution spike by taking transit.
There is also a bigger difference between free and $3 than between $3 and $6. Free means you don't have to buy a ticket, deal with the app or ticket machine, or have an existing public transit card. The "power of free" is worth considering here.
We often think of everyday behavior in terms of cost-benefit, but that's not all it is. Waiving the fee is a signal to indicate that taking public transit is socially desirable. That could be an effective nudge for many who are indecisive.
When I actually calculate the gas cost for a trip in a car, I am usually surprised at how large it can be. I wouldn’t be surprised if the $3 actually is less than the gas cost for many affected commutes.
However I think you are probably right that it won’t make much difference for a single week, since I think people tend to ignore this cost. Filling up the tank is infrequent enough and part of a routine that imo it doesn’t feel like a marginal cost and feels more like a fixed cost of car ownership
The $3 -> wouldn't motivate a lot of people, it's more like the cherry on top of asking folks nicely to drive less.
Like if you asked me to help you move a couch and offered me a beer, a beer isn't really a fair trade for the labor value, but I'm being nice and helping, a nice treat makes things a little better.
Cultural differences. Think of pandemic days, and how each country/city operated. Despite having almost no official lockdowns, Tokyo operated in self-induced lockdown style as people didn’t really want to exacerbate the problem. It was kind of the opposite in other places.
People in Switzerland might consider other things as the main goal (making the air cleaner), and this could be a simple nudge to change their behaviours. It’s not always monetary competitiveness that shapes behaviour.
This is excellent, but I always wonder at the way cities seem to bend over backwards for the worst technology for moving people ever invented, and don't dare do anything that deprioritizing the use of this technology.
Here, I found some street parking for cars: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Quai+Turrettini/@46.205451...
Alongside a gorgeous canal, with bike lanes there as well as what appears to be a train station a few blocks away, as well as what may be some kind of street car station? I can't imagine a more phenomenal waste of space given the far superior transport options surrounding this area. Go west just a bit and you can see a much more useful use of that space: some greenspace https://maps.app.goo.gl/xmDdqxob4LegGvwt5 (I don't understand why this business' pin is there but so be it).
Go east a bit and see how an entire bridge is wasted on giving cars some complicated spaghetti to let them go either north or west. https://maps.app.goo.gl/GQNMabh7d9cEf7MC7 Instead that entire middle portion could be further bike parking (you can see some is already there) or a wonderful greenspace to enjoy the river as you cross the bridge. Hell, you could probably fit a few food stands there if you really wanted to get jiggy with it.
In the era of the hyperdense city and the perfections we've brought to non-car transportation technologies, it's time to let cars go. They were a bad idea, we can see that now from how they clog our cities, kill our kids, and cause us to choke on their exhaust, let's be done and aggressively remove them!
Edit: more examples, look to the river near here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/45iLSKpVa4kLwuM69 Everyone's view of the river spoiled, and precious space wasted, all so that 28 cars, just 28 cars, can park on the street.
Or, compare this neighborhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Xobo9E5jjQU2Pv2f8 to this one: https://maps.app.goo.gl/SAEYTGBqFDZXUkMn9 Note how much more dense, how much more housing and businesses, fit in the former, how much easier it is to walk around and get places. Notice how in the latter, they turn all their space in the pavilions into parking lots , whereas in the former, they use them for gardens and trees. The former is for humans, the latter is for cars, which aren't people! So why do we build a city for them?
> I always wonder at the way cities seem to bend over backwards for the worst technology for moving people ever invented, and don't dare do anything that deprioritizing the use of this technology.
I don’t get it - is your comment pro or anti public transportation :)
The rest of the comment gives some pretty nice examples of how bad cars are from a land use perspective alone
OK, imma just say the quiet part out loud here: There would be less need for daily transportation commutes if companies allowed 100% WFH wehre applicable and the government would force/incentivise this on companies for the positions that can be done remotely in order to save the environment. Especially given that Geneva labor market skews heavily towards specialized office jobs like diplomats, banking and pharma where most time is spent in front of the PC and on Teams/Zoom calls anyway.
But from my job search there and anecdotes from mates and the internet opinions, Swiss companies have a highly mandatory in-office culture, plus the cross-border commuters from neighboring countries who drive in and out every day to benefit both from high Swiss wages and also from the cheaper living abroad. Well then no shit Sherlock your air quality goes down the shitter.
So I doubt that the public transportation not being free is what caused the higher pollution in the first place, since people drive by car not because public transportation costs too much money, but because on their commute route, it saves a lot of time despite the extra cost of car ownership (you can make more money but you can't make more time).
To me, it just feels like another way for politicians washing their hands of the elephant in the room: the forced need to commute every day for jobs that don't need it. It seems like the lessons from the pandemic have been quickly forgotten since early to mid 2020 when everyone was locked in their homes had the best air quality we ever experienced, but somehow politicians can't put this 2 and 2 together and go fight made up strawmen instand.
Well put. Easy pollution-reducing policies are all under our noses but governments chicken out of implementing them for whatever reason. Office workers having at least one mandated day of remote work would be a godsend, and it's very noticeable post-pandemic how much nicer the cities where this is unofficially implemented are on fridays
> OK, imma just say the quiet part out loud here: There would be less need for daily transportation commutes if companies allowed 100% WFH wehre applicable and the government would force/incentivise this on companies for the positions that can be done remotely in order to save the environment.
Exactly. On the contrary, the politicians everywhere are pushing for return to office, or at least not promoting WFH. And then some people on HN just complain that private cars are enemies of the public service.
Not sure it will make a difference to people's travel habits; I think those inclined to take public transport already do so.
But it does highlight the fact that we subsidize private transport (our taxes pay for the roads, traffic police, etc.), so why not public transport?
What do you mean "subsidizing private transport"? I'm sorry but "your tax" also includes the tax paid by people who drive private cars. And since most public transit companies don't break even anyway (at least in Canada), it is the private drivers that are paying for the public.
> I'm sorry but "your tax" also includes the tax paid by people who drive private cars.
Look up what % of infrastructure costs that tax covers wherever it is you live.
Surprised? Now consider that the infrastructure is just a tiny % of the overall cost. What about the whole car and gas supply chains? What about the externalities of burning so much fossil fuel every day? What about the healthcare costs of having to treat natural consequences of sedentary lifestyles? What about the opportunity costs of the loss of life due to the above and simply due to traffic deaths and injuries?
The people who drive said cars pay a tiny fraction. The costs are just externalized.
I mean, you cant honestly believe 20 cents per gallon covers the 25 trillion in Interstate costs, right?
Or the over 1 trillion dollars in damages in Texas alone due to oil drilling.
Did you miss the part about the roads for cars? If I don’t have a car I’m still paying for all the roads built and continuously maintained so that those with cars can drive them. So yeah, we are subsidizing private transport.
You are still depending on the roads for trucks that transport merchandises around and emergency vehicles and a lot of other stuffs. We are also paying for your public transit, thank you, because at least in my city it never breaks even, so everyone including us gets taxed -- but I have no issue with that -- I mostly take public transit anyway.
Sure, roads are multi-purpose. But if the roads were only used for public transport, transport of goods, and emergency vehicles, that would reduce wear and tear significantly and many might not even be needed. How much do you think road maintenance costs would drop by? Significantly. So that very large amount is being subsidized by taxes so people can drive private cars instead of taking public transport.
Yes, we as a US society are subsidizing private transport because "it's the American way". Other countries do this too but not to this extent. I'm in my 50s and never even owned a car until I moved back to the US ~7 years ago.
Careful with road wear and tear. Stress on the road goes as the 4th power of axle weight.
My car, a 2025 Hyundai Kona Electric SEL, weighs 3 800 pounds. Call it 4 000 when carrying one typical person. It has two axles so the axle weight is 2 000 pounds.
Let's call the amount of stress this puts on the road when driving from point A to point B 1 car's worth of stress.
Suppose we need to get 60 people from point A to point B. If we put them in 60 Konas that would result in 60 car's worth of stress.
A bit of Googling suggests that a typical 40-foot transit bus with 60 passengers would weigh around 36 000 pounds and has two axles which gives an axel weight of 18 000 pounds, which is 9 times that of the Kona.
The bus taking 60 people from A to B then will result in 9^4 car's worth of stress, which is a little over 6 500 car's worth of stress. That's a little over 100 times the stress from sending those people in 60 Konas.
There might be some differences due to other factors like tire types and speed, but the weight difference would be the dominant factor.
There are some good arguments for buses, but saving on road maintenance might not be one of them.
BTW, this outsized stress from heavy vehicles is also relevant to the ICE vs electric debate, since EVs usually weigh more than similar sized ICE cars.
For example the ICE version of the Kona is about 500 pounds lighter. The EV version should cause about 70% more stress on the road.
But wait! The ICE version needs gas, and gas is usually delivered to gas stations via tanker trucks. When the stress from that delivery of gas was taken into account it turned out that replacing ICE Konas with EV Konas would be a net reduction in road stress if the tanker truck that brought the gas had to drive more than just a few miles from wherever it gets filled up to the gas station.
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Could you please tell me the list of top polluters? Could you also please tell me which countries have not fulfilled their pro environment policies?
Also look at the historic CO2 emissions per capita.
And btw, we also burn plastic, just in facilities. Doesn't make it fundamentally better as the CO2 is still released into the air.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
You do realize that they're combatting polution in Geneva? As in smog?
Many people do not know: "smog" is short for "smoke fog".
Ozone pollution due to smog is local.